Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager is a retired major general in the United States Air Force and noted test pilot. He was the first man to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental Bell X-1 (shown below) at Mach 1 at an altitude of 45,000 feet.

Apollo 14 was the eighth manned mission in the Apollo program , the third to land on the Moon. It was the last of the "H missions", targeted landings with two-day stays on the Moon with two lunar EVA’s, or moonwalks. The crew for the nine-day mission included , from left to right, Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell, Commander Alan Shepard, and Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa. Shepard and Mitchell made their lunar landing on February 5 in an area originally targeted for the aborted Apollo 13 mission. During the two lunar EVS’s, 93 pounds of Moon rocks were collected and several surface experiments were conducted. Commander Shepard hit two golf balls while on the lunar surface with a make-shift club he brought from Earth.

Apollo 1 (official designation Apollo/Saturn-204) was planned to be the first manned mission of the Apollo lunar landing program, set to launch in February 1967. Its flight was precluded by a fatal fire which killed all three crew members (Command Pilot Virgil “Guss” Grissom (center), Senior Pilot Edward H. White (left), and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee (right), and destroyed the Command Module cabin(pictured below). This occurred during a pre-launch test of the spacecraft on Launch Pad 34 at Cape Canaveral. The name Apollo 1, chosen by the crew, was officially assigned retroactively in commemoration of them.

The Apollo 8 Astronauts, from left to right,were mission Commander
Frank Borman, Lunar Module Pilot William Andres, and Command
Module Pilot James Lovell. After coming out from the back side of
the Moon,the crew read ten verses of the book of Genesis from the
Bible. This was during a Christmas Eve TV broadcast, a portion
of this broadcast is below.

The crew members of Apollo 8 were the first Americans to directly
see the far side of the Moon and the first humans to see the planet
Earth from beyond it’s low orbit.